


Cucullus non facit monachum

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: An astronomical number of commas, Clowns, Gen, Graduate School, Shakespeare References, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25253416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: The Fool’s Guild and the Assassin’s Guild shared a courtyard. It was divided down the middle geographically and temporally.
Relationships: Lord Downey & Havelock Vetinari, Verence II & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	Cucullus non facit monachum

The Fool’s Guild and the Assassin’s Guild shared a courtyard. It was divided down the middle geographically and temporally. 

On one side was the perpetually only-slightly-overgrown garden of the kind that can only be achieved by a very wealthy institution with a rota of perennial flowers and multiple gardeners working at cross purposes. On the other side was a pattern of slick pavement, carpet-smooth grass, small wooden pallets to use as stages and trees carefully trimmed* so that the lowest branches could not be reached from the top of a ladder.

The Assassins were allowed use of the courtyard from 0400AST to 1600AST**, while the Fools used it “from forth the hour of four unto the hour of four, once more.”

One of the first things both Assassins and Fools are taught is how to fall on your arse.

“You’ll end up on the ground at some point, it’s inevitable, even if it’s not your style”

_“This is a very carefully choreographed move. It’s all about the look of the thing.”_

“You’re going to want to land on large muscle groups and avoid joints.”

_“Bums are funny. Bums are classic.”_

“If you can, get to the ground under your own control, determining your own speed. Keep your legs engaged.”

_“Timing is key. Louder, faster, funnier.”_

“You can either use the momentum of the fall and take it into a roll or disperse it. In either case get up onto your feet again, or wait, or travel with the roll. Make it strategic.”

_“Legs go up. It should be a big move. There should be bounce. We obey the rules of clowning at the expense, indeed at the surcharge of physical laws.”_

“If you’ve been injured, notice it. Understand what’s happened, what you can do to keep going, if you’re at a point where you can back up and reassess.”

_“If your physical body has been injured, ignore the pain. We are not our physical bodies. We are clowns.”_

“We are cool, calm and in control.”

_“Ignore the pain.”_

“Thank you Mr Bradlofrudd.” 

_“Yes, Brother Upsett.”_

-

April 32nd. 

Eight years into the incumbency of Lord Snapcase.

Grim faces watch two students sparring in the courtyard. 

They are both tall and slim, one sleek, elegant and confident, the other rather gangly and slightly younger. 

He is so close, the younger man thinks. His situation is precarious. In just a few months he will be in a palace. Unsafe and uncomfortable, certainly, but able to implement some of what he believes in.

He dodges a projectile by dropping into a crouch. Pivoting on one foot he seeks higher ground. There are rules to this kind of combat, very intricate rules, but they do not forbid scaling the walls of the courtyard. There are footholds to be found in the buttresses between the narrow gothic windows. Even if there weren’t he could brace himself between the structures. He scrambles up to nearly the second story, raises his weapon and takes aim.

But his opponent is faster.

There is a percussive jingle of bells as Verence the Fool hits the patchy zoysiagrass on the far side of the invisible line across the courtyard, a pie tin having clipped him on the temple at high speed.

This sound was followed by four long, mournful, whoopee cushion notes from the Fool’s Guild Gag Clock. While the rest of the clocks in the city continued chiming but before the Inhumation Bell tolled, the looming tutors in greasepaint escorted Verence’s now extremely nervous battle clowning partner, Lavatch, or, occasionally, “what is lavache?” back indoors. 

As the Inhumation Bell began to ring, two figures in black glided across the lawn to attend to the abandoned young man.

Havelock, Lord Vetinari, MA, MASc, Doctoral Candidate: Music, God Studies, Applied Pathology, the Assassins Guild of Ankh-Morpork, weighed the dented metal tin in his hands. “Yet who would have thought the old pan to have had so much custard in him?” 

“Gods, you’re so weird, Dog-Botherer,” Liam Downey, MA, Doctoral Candidate: Applied Pathology, the Assassins Guild of Ankh-Morpork, said, mostly for auld lang syne. 

“I‘d prefer if you did not involve the gods, Downey,” Vetinari said piously, or to be more accurate, agnostically. “They’re not very happy with my dissertation at the moment.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Only wrote two pages this week.”

“Dear me, Havelock, have you been ill?” 

Vetinari hauled the fallen Fool up onto his shoulder. 

From the opposite doorway a senior clown shouted “Crossing Guild walls! That was trespassing, that was!”

Vetinari raised an eyebrow, adjusting his hold across the young Fool’s knees. “Was it? I rather thought it was gravity.”

*With a pair of oversized barber shears on the end of a long stick, of course

**AST being Assassins Suspended Time, not to be confused with Ankh-Morpork Standard Time. The Inhumation Bell, being the fashionably latest clock tower bell to ring every hour on the hour in Ankh-Morpork, actually runs a full ten seconds fast. This provides a comfortable cushion for students, causality itself, and last ditch million-to-one chances.

-

Verence awoke in a room flooded with light and for several seconds was convinced that he had died. The blankets around him made him feel like he was drowning in an ocean of Djelibeybian cotton. 

He realized he was in the room on the corner of the Assassin’s Guild with six windows. All the blinds were pulled up. It was like being in a fish bowl, he’d never seen so much glass in a bedroom. The windows were on _two_ sides of the room. 

The Fool was on the edge of panicking when he realized he recognized the Assassin standing patiently in the shadows between the long rectangles cast by the half dozen windows. He was tall, dressed in a gown made of crepe and velvet with bell sleeves and a long hood, a dark parody of academic regalia. His dark hair was pulled up in a high ponytail that presumably no one would be stupid enough to try to grab. The dyed freshwater pearls in his earlobes seemed to reflect no light. The Assassins Guild dress code for those over thirteen consisted of one word: black. Havelock Vetinari was only a few years older than Verence and seemed to be treating the Assassins’ academic prospectus like a collectable card game. 

“What is your name, Fool?” Vetinari said, amused by the melodrama of his own question.

Verence shifted on the stifling pillows. He was still in motley, although the covered buttons near his throat had been undone to allow him to breathe more easily. “Verily, a Fool not gifted with a name is but a nameless Fool. I have no name but that given me by those that no longer are. To the Guild I am naught but the 5595th Butt.” 

There seemed to be a flash of ice-blue anger in the shadow between the wells of light. “What would you like to be called?”

“Verence, nuncle,” the Fool said.

“Good morrow, Verence,” the Assassin gave the kind of bow that was halfway between a nod and bobbing a curtesy. “You are mildly concussed from being hit by a metal pie tin and there may be internal contusions from impact with the ground.”

Verence moved his legs under the swamp of blankets. It hurt a lot to move, but he had endured much worse. 

“I am Lord Havelock Vetinari. Do you want breakfast?”

“What is there?”

“Egg custard, I believe.”

“Oh gods no... I mean...” Verence tried to get back on script, “I had it of a certain knight that swore by his honor that that the custard was good, but yet was not forsworn...”

“There’s toast, but I think all the butter went into the custard and pastry.”

“I can do dry toast.”

Verence was wearing makeup. It was written into the Guild charter that all members were required to. His looked like ordinary stage makeup, red high on the cheeks, lips painted pink, brown penciled under his eyelashes. It was smeared from sleep. 

“We’ve just had laundry,” Vetinari indicated a pile of towels. “And the washbasin’s over there. You can get over to it by leaning on stuff. I’ve fallen off a few roofs in my time.”

“Wherefore do you offer this courtesy?”

“The Fools were going to leave you out there. Sink or swim.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Why did you join the Fool’s Guild?”

“My grandfather sent me here.”

Vetinari picked up on what this entailed and sat down on the bed with a sigh. “Are you interested in politics, Verence?”

“Like taxes and infrastructure and foreign policy?”

Vetinari nodded.

“Oh yes. Extremely.”

“I’ll go bring up the toast.”

“You’re an angel,” Verence said sleepily in the tone of voice someone with a higher opinion of gentlemen and scholars might say ‘you’re a gentleman and a scholar.’

Havelock Vetinari, servant of principle, terrifying apparition, and student of theology, said “There’s a thought.”


End file.
